Usability and proprietary campus portal

August 25, 2005 5:49 AM

Our IT department installed a proprietary portal, that, in addition to requiring that popups be enabled, only works with Mozilla and not Firefox. And IE. Given that Firefox and Mozilla use the same rendering engine, is there an easy way to fool the evil portal into thinking that Firefox for OS X is really Mozilla?

The software, made by Sungard, throws up a big splash/warning screen every time I access the portal with firefox, then lets me in. Campus portals are the new monorail. And yes, I asked if they could tweak the software to allow firefox, and I was told that the software couldn't be changed. Uh huh.

I remember the pitch for the portal software:

"What can this portal do?"

"What do you want it to do?"

Monorail... Monorail...

posted by craniac to computers & internet (4 comments total)

This might help, however I have not installed it myself.
posted by sebas at 5:54 AM on August 25, 2005

i found a webpage suggesting the same extension as sebas as well as two other things to try:

"Firefox users (an alternative browser from the Mozilla Foundation) can install plug-ins for managing the user agent value, such as the User Agent Switcher or the UserAgent bar. Alternately, type the special URL "about:config" in the browser's location bar to access the browser's properties and use the popup menu to add a new property called "general.useragent.override" with the desired value."

good luck!
posted by clarahamster at 6:00 AM on August 25, 2005

Ooooh, tasty and elegant answers, I thank you! I'm feeling like such a sneaky Hax0r now. Added bonus!
posted by craniac at 7:20 AM on August 25, 2005

update: I tried the above extension and it works great.
posted by craniac at 8:39 AM on August 25, 2005